Divs are an important part of every HTML page. A div is a container that can hold other HTML elements inside of it. If you are a beginner and want to learn the basics of coding, check out our FREE 30-minute intro course here: training.mammothinteractive.com/p/learn-to-code-in-30-minutes

Divs are used to divide HTML into different sections. The sections can then be styled using CSS. You can change different things, including font style and background color. To follow along with this tutorial, visit jsbin.com, which allows you to test your code in real time. In JS Bin, click on the HTML tab to open a blank HTML file. Feel free to rename the title “Divs!” by replacing JS Bin with Divs!

As shown in the following code, to create a div, use opening and closing div tags within the body tag.

  <div>

  </div>

You can put a variety of items in a div. For this example, let’s put a header, paragraph, and link into the div.

  <div>
    <h1>Hi there!</h1>
    <p>I'm a paragraph!</p>
    <a href="#">Test link 1</a>
  </div>

h1 is the biggest header size. The p tag creates a paragraph. The a tag creates a link. Regarding the link, the web address to which you want the list item to link goes in the quotation marks. For our example, # is a placeholder.

Furthermore, we will make two more divs.

  <div>
    <h1>Hi there!</h1>
    <p>I'm a paragraph!</p>
    <a href="#">Test link 1</a>
  </div>
  <div>
    <h3>I'm an H3</h3>
    <p>I belong to div #2</p>
  </div>
  <div>
    <h5>I am H5!!!</h5>
    <p>I'm in div 3!</p>
  </div>

Before we style the divs, we need a way to identify them. When we select a div in CSS, we need to know which div we’re targeting. If you call div like in the following CSS code, it will target every div on the page.

div {

}

For instance, to make the text color of every div yellow, code:

div {
color: yellow;
}

We usually want to be more specific than that. Therefore we can use classes to distinguish between divs. Classes are used in HTML, and then you can call the classes in CSS. They are a way of identifying specific elements on a page. Let’s assign our three divs the classes div-1, div-2, and div-3.

  <div class="div-1">
    <h1>Hi there!</h1>
    <p>I'm a paragraph!</p>
    <a href="#">Test link 1</a>
  </div>
  <div class="div-2">
    <h3>I'm an H3</h3>
    <p>I belong to div #2</p>
  </div>
  <div class="div-3">
    <h5>I am H5!!!</h5>
    <p>I'm in div 3!</p>
  </div>

Note that on an actual website with many divs, you want to name their classes more descriptively. Let’s say we want to modify only div-1. Open the CSS tab. To select the class in CSS, use the following format:

.div-1 {

}

Now we can style that div, such as add a border and change the text color and alignment.

.div-1 {
border: 1px solid black;
color: grey;
text-align: center;
}

To select and modify an item within div-1, type:

.div-1 a {
text-decoration: none;
color: lightblue;
<code}

The preceding code modifies only the a tag within div-1. Now that we’ve modified div-1, why don’t we modify div-2?

.div-2 {
font-style: italic;
border: 2px dashed black;
width: 50%;
}

In the preceding code, we changed the div’s font style to italic and border to 2px dashed black. We also set the width to be 50% of the size of the window. This is useful for responsive web design because the div width will resize as the window resizes.

For div-3, we can experiment with changing the background color and width.

.div-3 {
background-color: grey;
width: 25%
}

That was an introduction to divs in CSS and HTML. A large part of learning to code is experimentation, so play around with creating and modifying more divs. For more FREE tutorials, check out our 30-minute beginners course on coding: training.mammothinteractive.com/p/learn-to-code-in-30-minutes